Sarah Bakewell - How to Live - A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer

He knew that there was a price to be paid, apart from that of being berated by his wife. People often took advantage of his ignorance. Yet it seemed to him better to lose money occasionally than to waste time tracking every penny and watching his servants’ tiniest movements. In any case, other people were swindled too, however much they tried to prevent it. His favorite example of foolishness was a neighbor, the powerful Germain-Gaston de Foix, marquis de Trans, who became a miser and domestic tyrant in old age. His family and servants let him rant, and put up with his tightly rationed issues of food, while all the time helping themselves behind his back. “Everybody is living it up in various corners of his house, gaming, spending, and exchanging stories about his vain anger and foresight.” Still, added Montaigne on second thought, it did not matter, since the old man was convinced that he wielded absolute power in the house, and was therefore as happy as such a person could ever be.

“Nothing costs me dear except care and trouble,” wrote Montaigne. “I seek only to grow indifferent and relaxed.” One can imagine Pascal’s blood pressure going up on reading this line. What Montaigne claimed to want most for his old age was a son-in-law who would take all his responsibilities away. In reality, had he been patronized and pandered to by an outsider, his love of independence would probably have surged up in protest — and he does follow this remark about the son-in-law with a flurry of contrary statements:

I avoid subjecting myself to any sort of obligation.

I try to have no express need of anyone … It is very pitiful and hazardous to be dependent on another.

I have conceived a mortal hatred of being obliged either to another or by another than myself.

He was not thinking of household management when he wrote this: the subject is his commitments later in life to France’s new king, Henri IV, who seemed to want Montaigne at his beck and call. Montaigne would resist this with a determination verging on insolence — which was very much his attitude to more homely demands. Laziness was only half of his self-description; freedom was the other half. He even fantasized about becoming like Hippias of Elis, a Greek Sophist philosopher of the fifth century BC, who learned to be self-sufficient, teaching himself to cook, shave, make his own clothes and shoes — everything he needed. It was a fine idea. Still: a self-sufficient Montaigne, mending his doublet with needle and thread, digging his garden, baking bread, tanning leather for his boots? Even Montaigne himself must have found this hard to picture.

As usual, he let the whole topic lie amid contradiction and a spirit of compromise. If his protestations of incompetence failed to save him from a particular responsibility, he would knuckle down and do the job anyway, and probably more conscientiously than he liked to admit.

Nietzsche wrote of certain “free-spirited people” who are perfectly satisfied “with a minor position or a fortune that just meets their needs; for they will set themselves up to live in such a way that a great change in economic conditions, even a revolution in political structures, will not overturn their life with it.” He adds that such a person will tend to have “cautious and somewhat shortwinded” relationships with those around him. This sounds so much like Montaigne’s home arrangement that you almost wonder if Nietzsche was thinking of him, especially when he adds that this person “must trust that the genius of justice will say something on behalf of its disciple and protégé, should accusatory voices call him poor in love.”

In Montaigne’s case, his own voice was the first to pronounce this awful accusation. Others have taken this as encouragement to repeat it ever since, in a harsh tone, and without either Montaigne’s or Nietzsche’s sense of irony. But nothing in Montaigne’s writing, or his character, was ever so straightforward. However much he tries to persuade us that he is cold and detached, other images rise up before the mind’s eye: Montaigne springing to his feet in parlement to plunge into hot debate, Montaigne deep in passionate conversation with La Boétie, even Montaigne playing games for pennies with his wife and daughter by the fireside. Some of his answers to the question of how to live are indeed chilly: mind your own business, preserve your sense of self, stay out of trouble, and keep your room behind the shop. But there is another which is almost the exact opposite. It is …

My essential pattern is suited to communication and revelation. I am all in the open and in full view, born for company and friendship.

He loves to mingle. Conversation is something he enjoys more than any other pleasure. He depends on it so much that he would rather lose his sight than his hearing or speech, for talk is better than books. There is no need for it to be of a serious nature: what he likes best is “the sharp, abrupt repartee which good spirits and familiarity introduce among friends, bantering and joking wittily and keenly with one another.” Any conversation is good, so long as it is kind-spirited and friendly. Social grace of this kind should be encouraged in children from an early age, to bring them out of their private worlds. “Wonderful brilliance may be gained for human judgment by getting to know men. We are all huddled and concentrated in ourselves, and our vision is reduced to the length of our nose.”

Montaigne loved open debate. “No propositions astonish me, no belief offends me, whatever contrast it offers with my own.” He liked being contradicted, as it opened up more interesting conversations and helped him to think — something he preferred to do through interaction rather than staring into the fire like Descartes. His friend Florimond de Raemond described his conversation as “the sweetest and most enriched with graces.” Yet when Montaigne was not feeling sweet, or when he was carried away by the topic of a discussion, he could be vociferous. His passion led him to say things that were indiscreet, and he encouraged others to do the same. Freedom of expression was the law of his house. At the Montaigne estate, he said, there was never any “waiting on people and escorting them here and away, and other such troublesome prescriptions of our code of manners (oh, what a servile and bothersome practice!).” Guests behaved as they pleased, and those who craved solitude could also go and do their own thing for as long as they liked, without causing offense.

As well as banishing formal etiquette, Montaigne discouraged tedious small talk. Self-conscious solo performances bored him too. Some of his friends could keep a group rapt for hours with anecdotes, but Montaigne preferred a natural give and take. At official dinners away from home, where the talk was merely conventional, his attention would wander; if someone suddenly addressed him, he would often make inappropriate replies, “unworthy of a child.” He regretted this, for easy conversation in trivial situations was valuable: it opened the path to deeper relationships, and to the more pleasant evenings where one could joke and laugh at ease.

For Montaigne, “relaxation and affability” were not merely useful talents; they were essential to living well. He tried to cultivate what he called a “gay and sociable wisdom”—a phrase that calls to mind a famous definition of philosophy, by Nietzsche, as the “gay” or “joyful” science. Nietzsche, like the libertins , agreed with Montaigne that a humane, sociable understanding was what mattered, although Nietzsche himself found it difficult. His relationships were often traumatic. Yet, in a touching passage of his early book Human All Too Human , he wrote: